A Brief History of Random Numbers

Roman 12mm dice, The Portable Antiquities Scheme/ The Trustees of the British Museum (CC BY-SA 2.0)

“As an instrument for selecting at random, I have found nothing superior to dice,” wrote statistician Francis Galton in an 1890 issue of Nature. “When they are shaken and tossed in a basket, they hurtle so variously against one another and against the ribs of the basket-work that they tumble wildly about, and their positions at the outset afford no perceptible clue to what they will be even after a single good shake and toss.”

How can we generate a uniform sequence of random numbers? The randomness so beautifully and abundantly generated by nature has not always been easy for us humans to extract and quantify. The oldest known dice were discovered in a 24th century B.C. tomb in the Middle East. More recently, around 1100 B.C. in China, turtle shells were heated with a poker until they cracked at random, and a fortune teller would interpret the cracks. Centuries after that, I Ching hexagrams for fortunetelling were generated with 49 yarrow stalks laid out on a table and divided several times, with results similar to performing coin tosses.

Excerpt from “A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates”

But by the mid-1940s, the modern world demanded a lot more random numbers than dice or yarrow stalks could offer. RAND Corporation created a machine that…